Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  “Shtick and move, Andre! Shtick and move! Brent, keep your right up, kid!”

  I jabbed again and again, trying to do it from my feet up, putting some kind of snap into it, and maybe because I was an inch or two taller than Brent, it wasn’t hard to hit him, his eyes pink and wet now, as if he was about to yell or cry, and I did not feel badly about what I was doing to him. I only wanted to keep jabbing and scoring points, to get him so frustrated he’d throw a wild punch and leave himself open for something more dangerous than a jab.

  “Time!”

  Brent turned and walked back to his corner, pulling at the laces with his teeth. He ducked between the ropes and yanked off his gloves, and Bill followed him. “Where’re you goin’, Brent? That was only one round, kid.”

  “I gotta go to work.” Brent dropped his gloves in the crate and unwrapped his hands and walked out.

  I was still in the ring, sweating, my breathing back down to normal again. Ray Duffy stood from where he’d been sitting against the wall. I hadn’t known he was there. He said to Bill, “The bag don’t hit back.”

  Bill nodded once. He smiled over at me. “That was a good shtart. I think you got the killer instinct, kid.”

  Which meant it didn’t bother me too much to hurt somebody, that seeing his pain did not make me slow down or stop.

  TWO OR three times a week I’d spar whoever was around. Many times it was Bobby, who’d come back to the gym and was doing his own lifting routine. He’d gained some weight, but he looked happy and in love, and sparring him was like fighting somebody crazy. He fought with both hands down at his sides, smiling at you even after you’d popped him in the face, then he’d shift to the side and his right would swing up hard and fast, and once I wasn’t able to avoid it and it caught me in the cheek and knocked me four feet back against the ropes. Bobby moved in to finish me off, but Bill blew the whistle to stop it. He did that often because we still didn’t have any headgear and now guys were climbing into the ring with others not even close to their weight, and he was afraid of getting sued. “I could lose this place, boys, sho take it eashy, all right?”

  He was in danger of losing it anyway. Except for Sam and me, Bobby Schwartz and six or seven other guys from the neighborhood, his gym just didn’t have that many members. He didn’t have the cash to take out an ad in the paper, and he wasn’t even in the phone book. He often looked worried about this, walking around the floor holding his membership notebook, its pages largely empty.

  One afternoon I walked by the room where he slept. Usually a couple of sheets hung over the opening, but now they were down and I could see the mattress on the floor, the unzipped sleeping bag, a stained pillow. There was a mini-fridge and a hot plate, a jar of instant coffee, a box of Lucky Charms and a can of Campbell’s soup.

  By late winter, Bill Connolly’s gym would go out of business, and he would close his doors and move north to Maine. Years later, we would hear he’d died, something to do with his liver or kidneys. But none of that had happened yet, and it was a Saturday morning in the fall of 1976, I’d just turned seventeen, and Bill had arranged an exhibition of his fighters and his new ring. He’d had flyers made up, and he walked all over downtown, dropping them off at shops and barrooms. That morning, he bought a coffeemaker and brewed a pot and set it on a card table beside a bucket of doughnuts. Maybe this was his way of drumming up business, or maybe he was just proud of us and his new ring and wanted to show it off, or both, but he laughed a lot, and slapped people hard on the back, eight or nine real boxers from real gyms in other towns along the river like Lawrence and Lowell.

  One of the first fights was Bill’s nephew Brent and Sam Dolan. Sam had his shirt off and looked like carved ice and made the rest of us look good. Next to him Brent looked puffy, his olive skin yellow. Bill called “Time!” and they danced around each other, trading jabs before Brent threw a left hook and missed and Sam hit him hard in the face with two short rights, Brent falling back, his eyes wide, his mouthguard loose, and Bill called “Time!” though the round had just begun. “Eashy, boys, it’s just an exhibition. Andre, you go next.”

  “Who with?”

  “Sam.”

  I didn’t want to fight him. I was sure he would kill me, and even if he didn’t, I did not want to punch the face of my friend. But we couldn’t embarrass Bill in front of the few who had come, so I stepped into the ring, eight-ounce gloves laced tightly over my wrapped hands and wrists, and Bill called “Time!”

  Boxing is intimate. The fighter across from you becomes nothing but eyes. You look at nothing else. Your peripheral vision picks up his gloves, his bare shoulders, sometimes even his footwork. But you watch his eyes because they can show you something just before he shoots off a jab or is trying to find his range against you, to set his feet and fire off a combination; his eyebrows may lift slightly, and you can see how his pupils sometimes darken with emotions fighters are supposed to be above: hurt, frustration, fear, rage, all of which can muddy your judgment, make you swing wild when, instead, you should be minimizing damage as best you can, waiting for your move. And so you never think how dangerous this is, that a motivated punch from 600-pushup Sam Dolan could possibly kill you, or at least knock you down and out.

  As soon as Sam and I got within punching range, I started jabbing, sticking and moving to keep him off balance and avoid getting hit. The first few jabs, Sam looked surprised I was actually punching him. Then he looked hurt. Then angry. He stepped in and threw a right hook, and when I weaved away from it I could feel the wind behind it. If I’d thought about that connecting, I would have stopped and walked out of the ring, but I kept jabbing. Sam’s eyes blinked every time. I never realized how green they were, like mine, and now they were dark and shining and looked betrayed. He swung at me harder and I was just able to avoid his glove and pop him in the face again. Somebody yelled something from outside the ring. Another voice said, “Quit dancing. Throw a combination.”

  I knew he was right, but I couldn’t do it. You left yourself open when you threw combinations, and I didn’t want to get hit even once by Sam. I jabbed him twice in the nose, and he waded in and threw a cross that knocked my glove into my shoulder and spun me halfway around and Bill called “Time!”

  He ducked into the ring. “That’s good, you two. But shomebody’s gonna get hurt.”

  Me, he meant. A couple men clapped halfheartedly. Others stood there looking at us like we’d disappointed them, that they’d come here to see a real exchange, not this. Sam and I gave our gloves to Bill to give to two more fighters, two kids from the avenues, and we stood side by side for the rest of the exhibition, but something had been wounded between us.

  I knew in a fight on the street he would’ve beaten the shit out of me. But I’d been able to frustrate him, and standing there beside the coffee and doughnuts I tried to ignore the feeling I’d just achieved something by hurting my best friend.

  6

  ONE LATE FALL afternoon, I came home from the gym to the smell of cooking. The house was quiet, no day party going on, and in the kitchen Suzanne and Jeb were standing by the stove. There was the lick of blue flames under a black iron skillet, hot oil popping and spattering under the rising smoke. Suzanne glanced over at me. “We chopped these tortillas out of the freezer. They’re the only thing to eat in this whole fucking house.” Jeb sprinkled salt on one and handed it to me and I blew on it and ate it. Suzanne stood back from the stove and wiped her eyes, then pushed a fork into the skillet, the grease crackling, the smoke thicker now.

  Jeb and I used to sit in Cleary’s kitchen, his mother passed out in the front room, and eat whatever he put on the table for us: cheese and crackers, Devil Dogs, peanut butter and jelly and bread we made sandwiches with, bags of potato chips and cans of Coke or Pepsi. Most of it was junk, and we knew it but didn’t care. Once he was in our kitchen and opened the fridge and saw its bright empty shelves and said, “What happened to the food?”

  What could we say to that? Even when Pop had
lived with us, there hadn’t been enough for snacks like Cleary had. And now there wasn’t enough for three meals a day either. It’s something we’d all gotten used to, that hollowness in the veins, the nagging feel there was always just a bit too much air behind your ribs.

  But some times in the month were better than others. Right after Mom got paid she’d go to the grocery store, and while there was never food to eat between meals, there seemed to be enough for the meals themselves. These were still the ones she could make from a can or something frozen, something quick so we didn’t eat too late, but sometimes Bruce would have money to give her, too, and there might even be enough for a few days of school lunches. We hadn’t sat around a table and eaten as a family since Pop had lived with us, and I no longer missed it, but our mother did. That fall when I spent so much time at Connolly’s Gym, she suggested we start having breakfasts again, sit-down breakfasts together, and for a few weeks she got up every weekday morning an hour earlier to pull that off.

  I’d be in the attic, lying in my bed in the early morning darkness, my breath clouding in front of me. I’d hear the door open at the bottom of the dusty stairwell and my mother’s cheerful voice calling me down. Eventually the five of us would be sitting at the dining room table we rarely used, the blue light of early morning seeping through the windows: Jeb with his wild hair and downy whiskers; Nicole in the brown sweater she wore to hide the brace she endured for her scoliosis; Suzanne in her hip-hugger jeans and a T-shirt, black eyeliner around both eyes like bruises. Mom would be dressed in a blouse and scarf, earrings and makeup, dressed for this job doing good in Boston when it had never paid her enough to do the good she wanted for us. But it seemed she was forever too tired to look for something else. And what else could she do anyway? She was only qualified for social work. She could work two jobs like Rosie’s mother, but then she’d never be home at all. Years later I would think about my father more, think about those three months off every year, his summer mornings writing and running, most every afternoon lying under the sun at the beach. But it seemed he’d chosen that job for those three months. He was as poor as we were, a condition he could endure for those ninety days it gave him back to write longer every morning than he did all year.

  For a few weeks that fall, Mom served us steaming bowls of oatmeal or Cream of Wheat with cinnamon toast—bread she’d butter, then sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon and slide under the blue flames of the broiler; other mornings, it’d be buckwheat pancakes and hot bacon and orange juice. One morning we woke to eggs Benedict with hollandaise sauce and baked peaches in pools of melted butter and caramelized brown sugar.

  But this didn’t last. It couldn’t. She ran out of money, and we were kids who went to bed late and didn’t get up in the morning. Before Mom had started these breakfasts, she’d be on her way to work when we were supposed to leave the house to catch the bus around seven. Even with those wonderful smells filling the house once again, we rarely made it to the table on time, and our mother, depriving herself of a little extra sleep for this, gave up. It was like living inside a great slumbering beast who’d woken just long enough to blink its watery eyes, howl, then turn over and go back to sleep.

  BUT THANKSGIVING was coming up, one of those days each year my mother always rallied for, when she seemed to shrug off the massive weight that was raising children alone, and it was like watching a night-blooming flower open its petals in the gloom: for a while holidays changed everything; she’d clean the house, and with genuine good cheer coax us into getting off our asses to clean, too. She’d put some Rolling Stones on the stereo and turn it up loud and make decorations out of construction paper and glue and yarn and glitter, taping these brilliant colors around the house. At Thanksgiving, there’d be earth tones—browns and greens and yellows. At Christmas: red, silver, and gold. On our birthdays we’d wake to presents in the living room, each of them wrapped by her; sometimes the paper would be homemade, a grocery bag she’d stenciled stars onto, then dressed with twine and a rope bow. There’d be store-bought paper, too, cut and taped perfectly around our new clothes, records, or books, these boxes laid out and stacked so that there always appeared to be more than there were. She probably spent the rent money on all this, and she put presents on layaway accounts she’d spend an entire year paying down.

  For this Thanksgiving, Mom had stuffed turkey with cornbread dressing. There was baked squash and Yorkshire pudding. There was homemade cranberry relish, steaming dirty rice and mashed potatoes and rolls made from scratch. She’d decorated the house and used an ironed sheet as a linen tablecloth. She’d been playing old jazz albums on the stereo, the same music she and Pop would listen to years earlier—Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, and Buddy Rich.

  Outside it was cold enough to snow, the sky gray, the front yard hard and brown. Bruce was south of Boston with his family, and Mom had put on makeup and a light sweater. She wore earrings and a bracelet like she did to work. Pop was due at three, and we’d be eating at four, and Mom worked in the kitchen, a Pall Mall smoking in an ashtray, sipping from a glass of Gallo red wine while she stirred gravy on the stove, Brubeck’s West Coast piano filling the house.

  It was holidays when the six of us sat down as a family again, and whenever we did, Pop sitting at the head of the table like he used to, it was as if we were each inhabiting roles to play for this brief time: Jeb was the reclusive genius; Nicole was the studious one getting good grades; Suzanne was the one just barely getting by but would; I was the newly disciplined athlete; Mom was the hardworking woman who managed to work, shop, do the bills and laundry, and cook for us too, especially on holidays like this; and Pop was the man who gave us most of whatever money he made and would sit at the head of the table like it was a throne he’d somehow left behind and was glad to reclaim two to three times a year.

  Maybe we could all feel the charade, that Jeb spent way too much time in his room with his teacher, that he’d tried to kill himself once and why wouldn’t he again?, that Nicole had become distant and brooding and terribly alone, that Suzanne would fall in love with one avenue boy after another, that her dealing money often bought us food we wouldn’t have had otherwise, that I was methodically teaching myself how to hurt people, that Mom was hardworking but could never keep up with the bills, the laundry, the shopping, with feeding us, with much of any of what Pop had left her behind to do on her own, that Pop was no longer the head of the family, though he still sat at the head of the table as if he belonged there.

  But I still looked forward to these dinners, to Mom’s wonderful cooking, to her flirting with Pop and he flirting with her. He’d look her up and down and tell her how beautiful she still was, that nobody could cook like her. She’d say, “Oh, be quiet, Andre,” and she’d reach for a spoon or knife or loaded dish, but she’d be smiling, her cheeks flushed. I looked forward to all four of us kids leaving our separate bedrooms to sit at a candlelit table and see each other over all this abundance, and for a little while we’d forget that Mom had to skip paying some bills to do this, we’d forget that this was all just temporary and everyone was an actor in a play none of us had written.

  It was three-thirty and Pop wasn’t here yet. Suzanne had come down from her room, Nicole too. Jeb was still up in his practicing guitar to his metronome, and Mom had me pull the turkey from the oven and set it on the counter. It was copper brown. I could smell its warm meat, the onions and cornmeal of the stuffing. Mom covered it loosely with foil and kept glancing at the clock. Pop should have been here a half hour already, sipping something in the kitchen with her like they used to. At four o’clock, she called his number and got no answer. At four-thirty, she pulled the foil off the turkey and began to carve it with a steak knife. She had me and Suzanne carry the side dishes out to the table and set them on the ironed sheet.

  “Well, goddamnit,” she said, “we’re just going to have to start without him.”

  But we didn’t. To start without him would be to start the play without the audience. We couldn’t.
We waited.

  Mom tossed her wine into the sink and began washing dishes. I don’t remember helping her, but I hope I did. Nicole and Suzanne ate some rolls, cool now.

  Sometime between six or seven, a car pulled up to the curb. Its headlights stayed on a while, and when they finally turned off I could see from the front room that it was Pop’s old Lancer. Then both doors opened. At first I thought he’d brought a girlfriend with him, but in the light from the porch I could see it was a man in an overcoat. He held a bag to his chest, and he turned and waited for Pop to walk around the hood of the car, both of them moving unsteadily up the sidewalk to the porch.

  The house had been quiet for a while. I stayed in the front room long enough to lower the needle back down onto the Brubeck album, then I met them at the door. The front hallway was dark, the bulb in the ceiling fixture blown long before, and both men were shadows walking into the house smelling like booze. My father put his arm around my shoulders, and he said, “Lou, Louie, this is my boy. This is Andre.”

  The man said something, and I shook his hand and he pushed the bag at me, two bottles of wine I carried past the loaded dining table, half the candles still burning, out to the kitchen where Mom leaned against the counter smoking a Pall Mall, drawing deeply on it, her eyes wary.